[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. .]

Passage Illustrated

As Lucie and her father sit in the garden the night before her marriage, the stress of losing her makes him think of his time of imprisonment in the Bastille:

It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him refer
to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new sensation
while his words were in her ears; and she remembered it long afterwards.

"See!" said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon.
"I have looked at her from my prison-window, when I could not bear
her light. I have looked at her when it has been such torture to me
to think of her shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my
head against my prison-walls. I have looked at her, in a state so
dun and lethargic, that I have thought of nothing but the number of
horizontal lines I could draw across her at the full, and the number of
perpendicular lines with which I could intersect them." He added in his
inward and pondering manner, as he looked at the moon, "It was twenty
either way, I remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in."

The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that time,
deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to shock her in
the manner of his reference. He only seemed to contrast his present
cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that was over.

References

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities: A story of the French Revolution. Project Gutenberg e-text by Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska. Release Date: September 25, 2004 [EBook #98].